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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What feeling did DuBois see in the culture of diaspora blacks?
(a) Resentment of progress.
(b) Longing for the apocalypse.
(c) Ambivalence about modernity.
(d) Anger for being taken into exile.

2. When did Richard Wright believe the western consciousness began to break down according to Gilroy?
(a) With the beginning of slavery.
(b) When religious understanding of the world collapsed.
(c) With the development of technology.
(d) With the beginning of the Renaissance.

3. What is the last period of black history, according to DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) Black self-reliance.
(b) Black music.
(c) Returning to Africa.
(d) Political autonomy.

4. Cornel West used DuBois' work as a solution to a crisis in what?
(a) Confidence in modernism.
(b) American literature.
(c) American pragmatism.
(d) International Marxism.

5. Which adjective does DuBois NOT use for the black experience?
(a) Communal.
(b) Individualized.
(c) Cosmopolitan.
(d) Alienated.

6. What do Jews and blacks fear from a discussion of the Holocaust and slavery?
(a) Remembering.
(b) The lack of evidence from their familial histories.
(c) Confronting all the things that cannot be known.
(d) Loss of uniqueness.

7. What did Richard Wright say was the core of modernization?
(a) Racial subordination.
(b) Slavery.
(c) Technological exploitation of resources.
(d) Cheap energy.

8. What does Gilroy say tradition helps to do with regard to slavery?
(a) Revise its effects.
(b) Cauterize its pain.
(c) Avoid its memory.
(d) Transform its legacy.

9. What does Gilroy say was a formative influence on black culture in Richard Wright's works?
(a) Capitalism.
(b) Common privation.
(c) Individualism.
(d) Self-reliance.

10. How does Gilroy say blacks are different from Jews?
(a) Blacks were never systematically exterminated.
(b) Blacks do not believe they all come from a common ancestor.
(c) Blacks do not have a homeland to return to.
(d) Blacks do not believe that they have a covenant with their god.

11. What does the Holocaust help us understood according to Gilroy?
(a) Genocidal terror.
(b) The black experience.
(c) Emotional indifference to suffering.
(d) Tolerance of cultural differences.

12. What heresy did Richard Wright commit, in Gilroy's account?
(a) Saying that black liberation was impossible, because the self is an endless war against itself.
(b) Saying that blacks shared responsibility for their situation.
(c) Saying that blacks really were inferior to whites, in certain cases.
(d) Saying that history would repeat itself with slavery.

13. What does Gilroy say we should accept as inescapable?
(a) Traditions.
(b) History.
(c) Hybridity.
(d) Essentialism.

14. What are blacks asked to remember instead of slavery?
(a) The benefits of Western progress.
(b) Black civilization.
(c) Their salvation from tribal existence.
(d) Their ongoing cultural pride.

15. What does Gilroy say is the only way to deal with the history of slavery?
(a) To look it in the face.
(b) To try to hide the past away.
(c) To dig into the past to find a personal origin in it.
(d) To live with what is in the present.

Short Answer Questions

1. What movement is Richard Wright associated with?

2. What phenomenon will help us understand race theory in Gilroy's account?

3. Why should blacks openly recognize the debt of their cultural language?

4. What does Gilroy say the Holocaust should help us see?

5. What does Gilroy say the Afrocentrism movement relies on?

(see the answer keys)

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